Shifting Boundaries, France Redraws Its Map

The 13th-century cathedral in Reims, France. People in the city are still uncertain how the new map will change their lives.CreditRebecca Marshall for The New York Times

By Celestine Bohlen

Nov. 18, 2015

REIMS, France — France is about to redraw its map again, reducing its number of mainland regions to 13, from 22, and producing tongue-twisters like the new geographic entity known as Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine.

The goal of the reform, as it is called, is to shrink a layer of French bureaucracy and perhaps save some taxpayer money. Whether that will actually happen come Jan. 1, when the borders shift, is one of the many unknowns facing this and other regions.

Here in the heart of Champagne country, a 45-minute train ride east of Paris in the famous cathedral city where 25 kings of France were crowned, the change of address is being met with a shrug and a sigh.

“We feel a bit lost,” said Jean-François Boulanger, a historian.

People here are still uncertain how the new map will change their lives. Will the new region have to adapt to Alsace’s special holiday schedule? What about regional sports competitions? Will France’s beauty contest now feature a Miss Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine?

Reims was not the capital of its old region, Champagne-Ardenne, an agricultural area where the production of Champagne holds pride of place. That distinction went to Châlons-en-Champagne, but Reims, with a population of about 180,000, was the main city.

Now it will be eclipsed by the capital of the new region, Strasbourg, population 275,000 and about 300 kilometers away, or about 185 miles, which fought hard to put its Alsatian stamp on the new region.

But Reims has history on its side, lots of it. After a long run as the “city of coronations” (the last was Charles X’s, held in 1825), it became known after World War I as the “martyr city,” a testament to the devastating damage to the city and its hallowed cathedral.

At the end of World War II, the Germans signed the first of two surrender treaties at 2:41 a.m. on May 7, 1945, in Reims, the site of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters, although history tends to remember the second, signed the next day in Berlin.

And it was here in 1962 that President Charles de Gaulle and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer marked Franco-German reconciliation in what de Gaulle described as “the theater of many clashes.”

After World War I, Americans played a big role in the reconstruction of Reims, the Rockefellers helped restore the cathedral, the Carnegie Foundation opened a splendid library, and a group of American women founded the American Memorial Hospital.

“It is a monument perhaps typical of a certain feminine specificity shared by a certain number of American women,” Mr. Boulanger said last week in a speech commemorating the hospital’s 90th anniversary. “It is a monument that makes the link between the past and the future.”

There is a more recent American twist to Reims’s story, with the opening in 2010 of a regional campus of the Institute of Political Studies, the prestigious French university known as Sciences Po. The original program offered at the Reims campus was “Euro-American,” and courses were taught mostly in English.

Nathalie Jacquet, director of the Reims campus, said the city was chosen because of the “historical heritage and incredible potential” of a 17th-century Jesuit college, restored at a cost of 79 million euros, or $85 million, paid by municipal and regional governments.

By 2018, the Sciences Po campus is expecting 1,600 undergraduate students, French and international, which will give Reims, which already has a local university, the feeling of a student town.

This is all good news for downtown establishments like the legendary Café du Palais, with its Art Deco décor and walls covered with original artwork. Jean François Vogt, whose family owns the cafe, is already hosting slam poetry events to attract the Sciences Po crowd.

“The problem for Reims is to keep its own identity,” Mr. Vogt said. “These students will have a real link to Reims, which is better than just having it listed in the guidebooks.”